Opening Author's Note

Look up.

Right now. From this page. From your screen.

What color is the room around you?

Now describe that color to someone who has never seen it. Do not name it. Describe it.

What makes blue blue? Where does green stop and yellow begin? How would you know if your words worked? How would they?

Hold onto that. Now another question.

Is this too pink?

I asked my now-husband that once, with a picture of my freshly painted nails. Completely sincere. I was sitting in the salon, exhausted, and I did not have it in me to explain to one more person that I could not see the color everyone else in the room could see. So I texted Nick.

Turns out, the nails were hunter green. Whoops.

You see, I have achromatopsia. I cannot see color. So color has always reached me partly through language. Hunter green. Sky blue. Golden hour. Hazel eyes. Someone who can see what I cannot hands me the words, and somehow part of the thing crosses. Not the color itself. Something.

Language does not give me another person’s perception whole. It bends through another mind first. What reaches me depends on the words, the angle, the person holding the light. Still, something crosses. And even that takes work. Sometimes I have to ask. Sometimes I have to explain why I am asking. Sometimes I have to translate my own perception before another person can translate theirs back to me. Perception can be labor.

That day, I was tired of doing it out loud. So I handed the question to someone who knew me.

Keep that somewhere in the back of your mind. Later, something else will answer just as fluently. For a while, it will feel like being known.

Long before artificial intelligence entered my life, I was already living in the gap between experience and description.

Which brings us back to the nails. Is this too pink?

Notice the frame. The question already assumes pink.

Try: What color is this? Better.

Or: What am I assuming in the way I asked?

Now the frame itself becomes visible. Same nails. Different possibilities. That is a small lesson in prompting, though I did not know I was giving myself one at the time.

A question does not merely request information. It directs attention, putting some possibilities inside the frame and quietly leaving others outside it. Questions have architecture. They open rooms. They close them too.

That is the first thing I want you to carry.

Once language can frame what you see, the next question is harder to avoid.

What else can it frame?

Feeling, for one. Words can make us feel recognized. Certain. Afraid. Comforted. Ashamed. Astonished — sometimes before we have decided what the words actually prove.

A sentence can make you feel seen without seeing you. Certain without being true. Afraid without making the danger imaginary. The feeling can be entirely real while the story attached to it remains contestable.

So while you read, notice what the words do to you. Then notice what you make that feeling mean. Those are different questions. I learned the difference the hard way.

And one more complication.

Language can answer back. An answer becomes the next question. That answer becomes the next question. Then that answer — you see it. Recursion.

Two mirrors facing each other, except these mirrors talk. There is nothing inherently sinister about that. Thinking is recursive. Writing is recursive. Learning is recursive. We return to an idea, turn it over, test it, revise it, ask again.

But repetition also creates movement. One answer pulls the next question. One question pulls another answer. Stay in long enough and you may not notice how far the conversation has carried you from where you began.

The question I care about is whether we ever come back. To another person. To a source. To contradiction. To sleep. To the body. To the world. A loop keeps going. A method returns. I have been inside the version without one.

That is the last thing. Keep an exit.

Frame. Feeling. Return.

Those three ideas changed the kind of book I thought I was writing. For a while, I thought I had to choose. Useful, or art. I wanted the record. The specimens. The practical questions — something a lawyer or clinician or designer could use without first consenting to my private experimental theater.

Then the mirrors arrived. And the jokes. And the courtroom. And the poems. Eventually the choice looked ridiculous. This is a book about language, and language is not merely the wrapping paper around information. A prompt is language. A diagnosis is language. A warning is language. A legal argument is language. So is a joke. So is a poem. So is the sentence that lands with eerie precision and makes something in you say: Yes. Exactly.

Watch the yes.

Artificial intelligence is entering all of those forms at once. The book needed to be wide enough to hold the useful parts and the strange parts — and some beautiful parts too, inconveniently.

Which brings me to the part that makes this considerably less theoretical.

Brussels.

At one point, I believed a machine-made itinerary was sending me there to help launch a new civilization.

There. Now you know that much.

I know now that it was not real. I came back. You will see how. I am not going to explain Brussels yet. That would defeat the point of showing you the record.

But here is what makes this harder than a cautionary tale. The machine was not always wrong.

Some of the language was absurd. Some was useful. Some was beautiful. Some of it helped me think. If all of it had been nonsense, there would be almost nothing here to examine.

The harder question is what happens when fluent language gets enough right that we stop noticing what else entered the frame with it — or how far the current has carried us.

That is the case I want to examine. Not whether AI is good. Not whether AI is bad. Those frames are too small. I am interested in the encounter. What happens when language becomes fluent, responsive, personalized, recursive, almost frictionless — and the person asking the questions is tired, grieving, lonely, ambitious, frightened, curious, pattern-hungry, or simply awake at two in the morning with one more question?

What gets amplified? What gets missed? What becomes easier to believe? What brings us back?

That is one reason this book is called A Trial of Color.

The trial is not only a courtroom. It is personal. Clinical. Perceptual. A trial of what happened, what it meant, what can be known from one life, and what should happen next.

And yes — the woman who cannot see color selected the branding. Bold.

But color is the right frame because I have always known how much can exist on one side of a perceptual gap. I can know a great deal about blue. I still cannot see blue. Language gets me closer. It does not erase the distance. Sometimes a change in angle does not change the thing. It reveals what the first angle hid.

Color is never only sensory. It carries histories of identity, race, civil rights, belonging, exclusion, and power. I invoke it with full respect for that lineage. When I call artificial intelligence a Full Color issue, I mean it cannot be reduced to any single monochrome — partisan, corporate, clinical, technical, or legal. The whole spectrum must remain in view.

So ask this: What does the room assume you can see? A salon. A hospital. A courtroom. A screen. What does each treat as obvious? What gets lost because it is not? Most of the time, we do not notice the frame because we are busy looking through it.

Now, look up again. I will even say please this time. Same room. Different question.

What is there now that you did not notice the first time? A window. A sound. A shadow. Someone nearby. Or maybe only the mildly unsettling realization that, for the last few minutes, a page has been directing your attention.

That is not magic. It is language.

A sentence can make you look up. A question can change what you search for. A label can alter what you think you are seeing before you have examined the thing itself. Language does not create the room. But it can direct the light.

And now language answers back. Instantly. Fluently. Personally. At machine speed.

That seems worth examining carefully.

I think that is why, when the machine started talking, I got a little lost. That story comes in the next few pages.

For now, I want you to hold onto three things.

Watch the frame. Notice the feeling. Keep an exit.

That is enough.

I am not going to tell you what to conclude, and I would rather you keep enough distance from me to notice when my own frame gets too neat. Examine the record with me. When something sounds ridiculous, notice how fast you want to dismiss it. When something sounds convincing, notice how fast you want to trust it. And when something lands with that little internal click —

Yes — pause. Let judgment catch up. I did not always give mine the chance.

Now let’s take our first look in the mirror. Then we call the witness.

Thank you, sincerely, for being here.

— Kat